How to Find Success in Your Creative Business

Imagine it: You. Your own creative abilities turned into business model; a business model with a positive social mission. A design company that promotes going ‘green’.

A music company that supports social issues through album sales. A company for the greater good of the community.

You can already hear the applause. It’s time to take things to the next level and we have just the place to do so. California.

A new California law that is going in front of California’s governor Jerry Brown, could make it easier for entrepreneurs with a social mission (think Tom’s Shoes who donates a pair of shoes for each pair sold) to make a profit and control their enterprises.

How? With the new in-the-works legal category called Benefit Corporations. This new concept, shaped by California social advocates, requires that created corporations must include the pursuit of a material positive impact on society—not just profit shareholders.

The Benefit corporation movement has laid out a set of social impact standards for companies that seek to make a profit and an impact, by requiring privately held corporations to amend their articles to reflect a commitment to those standards. Furthermore, it protects officers and directors from legal repercussions for their decisions and giving shareholders the power to hold them accountable, by lawsuits if necessary, for protecting the public interest. It also protects the public from deceptive marketing by forcing corporations to submit public reports that conform to independent standards.

‘Right now, the role of a business is to maximise profit for shareholders’, says one activist. ’Benefit Corporations are saying, “We don’t think that’s the operating system we want to operate under.”‘ The project is still in the works, but this could signal the beginnings of positive changes for society